The trouble with the Sleeping Beauty, remarked Angela Carter, is that she never had “much get-up-and-go”. Like Carter, Sally Cookson likes to make a joyful story by reimagining fairytales and familiar fictions. After last year’s glorious Jane Eyre she has turned to Sleeping Beauty.
Everything is swivelled around from the traditional fairytale. This is a gauze-and-glitter-free kingdom. What’s more, the dozing central figure is a prince. He grows from a wide-faced baby puppet into a drippy adolescent. There is a spell and it does involve – well, it is panto time – a prick. Bad Fairy Sylvia, grumpy about being left out of a party, threatens death by a sharp instrument. The King and Queen immediately abolish “pointy fingers and sharp tongues” from the realm.
Sylvia at one point disguises herself as Janet the Window Cleaner. At another she becomes a simpering shepherdess: “tarry awhile”. She is actually a man with a handbag. As are the Wise Women who try to protect the slumberer, until they are transformed into the most on-trend of theatrical animals. A few weeks ago the entire cast of Polly Findlay’s As You Like It crawled delightfully on to the stage as a flock nuzzling and baaing. At Bristol when the handbaggers troop on wrapped up in black woolly hats and mittens, they too are instantly recognisable as sheep.
Charm, and charms, don’t carry this all the way to success. It is an intriguing but surprisingly tepid occasion. Cookson has interwoven the Beauty plot with an 18th-century folk Romany folk tale, The Leaves That Hung But Never Grew. Perfectly interesting but absolutely confusing. It enables the show to have an undaunted heroine, who wakes up the unfortunately named Prince Percy by giving him mouth-to-mouth. Yet it also introduces as many unfathomable episodes as the baggiest of pantos. Without the saving grace of pantomime: the stirring of an audience into excited participation.
